Sebastien Schmitt, robotics division manager for Stäubli North America, explains what the company envisions as the five stages of human-robot collaboration.

The efficient “vrrrrr” of assorted pick-and-place, sorting, spraying, and inspecting robotic arms again provided a fitting industrial soundtrack to the Association for Advancing Automation’s biennial Automate trade show in Chicago in April. But some robotics systems purveyors this year were keen to show off not just the speed and accuracy of their robots but also new features designed to let robots operate safely in closer proximity to humans than has been the norm up to this point.

Swiss vendor Stäubli, for example, used Automate to introduce its TX2 line of “cobots,” a collection of six, six-axis models (not commercially available until next year) that use a sensing exoskin, not unlike that on FANUC’s CR series of collaborative robots, rather than a sensor at the base of the machine to detect motion while the robot is operating. This exoskin, dubbed the TX2 Touch system, can slow or stop the robot’s operation when a human gets too close. Sebastien Schmitt, robotics division manager for Stäubli North America, explained what the company envisions as the five stages of human-robot collaboration: